The text looks like the Bookman family to me with a decorative intial letter that might be something like Vivaldi or another modern script-type font. They are definitely not the same font but I think the original poster was aware of that._________________God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny. -- Garrison Keillor

oh, wow, Parisine is lovely! And makes me curious to see the American edition, too Sometimes the name of a typeface and the occasion to use it just fit perfectly!

and

Rainey wrote:

I used to love to look through his enormous books of type faces. I wonder what those books would look like  or, more to the point, weigh  now, now that people design and offer fonts as shareware inventing new styles with increasing fury and imagination.

These old books of typefaces are still very much sought after and cherished by typophiles and although it's meanwhile less complicated to design and distribute typefaces, there are growing demands at the same time, for example to meet all the requirements emerging out of an increasing global communication (: special accented letters of different languages) or the wish to get a whole family with matching serif, sans serif and eventually a slab serif, too, and with italics and small caps and eventually swash letters and additional ligatures, all in different and well balanced weights, so it is still a lot of diligent work and time needed to design a good and useful typeface. So the books picturing these are still very heavy, despite thinner paper, but nothing can beat a printed book

And out of typophile curiosity I'd love to ask: is there a chance for a picture of your dad's typeface? Maybe not at this place, because it might get a little off-topic, but eventually via flickr?

Alas! He died more than 20 years ago and all that stuff is gone. I have no idea where.

The only thing I found was this reference to the Selectric typewriter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectric but he designed it well before the development of the interchangeable typefaces. When he designed it, it went on the original proportionable spacing typewriters that had conventional keys. I can't remember what it was called  maybe an Executive  but I well remember how frustrating it was because I was as lousy a typist then and, although it had a correcting feature, you had to know how many units to backspace for each letter and I did NOT!

You'll also see that I remembered the name wrong.

Presidential Elite is the only named typeface I can remember that was his. But I also remember coming home from college with my first checking account and regaling him with what I knew about how important it was not to borrow checks that had magnetic imprinting (the pre-cursor of bar codes) only to find out that was another project he had been on.

He also gave expert testimony on typewritten notes sent by Jimmy Hoffa in a jury tampering trial. That was the first summer my sister and I went away to summer camp. I didn't learn until I was in college that that was to remove us from whatever retribution there might have been. _________________God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny. -- Garrison Keillor

that something as peaceful as type and typography can lead to such dangerous situations ... at least seen historically there are a lot of these stories, too ... but I hope you nevertheless enjoyed your stay in the summer camp.

Thanks a lot for researching, maybe I come by a Selectric typewriter some time, this would be one more opportunity to send extra greetings to you then, one of the other opportunities I think of might be the minute I'll spot Meyer lemons -- we talked about them many moons ago and at least until now they are impossible to find in this country